Thicker Than Water
by sakuruth
Summary: Anya, after "Selfless", looking back at her family and friends; she doesn't like what she sees.


She understands, conceptually, the idea of having family and friends. She knows that, in theory, a family is a group you're related to by blood and marriage. She knows friends are people you like who like you back. She's pretty sure love is supposed to factor in to both ideas. What she doesn't understand is how any of that applies to her, or even if it ever has.  
  
The first family she remembers was related by blood, true enough. Mother and father and daughter. But what did that have to do with anything when the trolls killed her parents? Her aunts and uncles, blood relatives that they were, disavowed 'Aud the Changeling' and sent her off. Her cousins, mostly older, laughed at her. 'Stupid Aud, you don't belong with us!' So much for blood ties.  
  
Her next family was going to be Olaf. Large, strong Olaf who killed the trolls and kept her safe, and who she loved. But Olaf didn't love her, not enough to keep from straying. She was upset, because it didn't make sense to her. How could he claim that he loved only her, and then go and sleep with other wenches? She swore she'd never love again, and turned him into a troll.  
  
That brought her to meet the father of her next family. He was a demon, one she'd never heard of, but that wasn't unusual; people didn't like talking to her. D'Hoffryn swore he'd give her a new family. But they didn't have blood ties or marriage to bring them together, and she never quite understood how it made a family. She didn't care, though, because she was happier there. D'Hoffryn gave her a new name for her new family. He looked after her and she did her best to please him.  
  
She made her first friend there. Halfrek. Lovely, sweet Halfrek, who understood her not at all but tried anyhow. They were nothing alike, Anyanka was committed to the life of a vengeance demon completely and utterly. She had no intention of losing this family like she'd lost the ones before; if she was good enough, if she did her job properly, the Lower Beings would be pleased. And if they were pleased, he would be pleased. And he wouldn't leave her, or be destroyed, and she'd have a family forever. Halfrek liked vengeance well enough, but she always insisted that there was something more to life than work. Anya could never make her understand how very important it was that she have a family; maybe because, when she was little and still a human, Hallie's family had been mean to her. They didn't abandon her or cast her out, like Aud's; they just abused her. Halfrek didn't appreciate families. And she didn't quite grasp why Anyanka couldn't bear men, or the society scene. She who had once been Aud, scorned and rejected by society and men, wasn't as amused with playing among the humans any more than was necessary; Halfrek, though, took delight in posing as a pretty human girl and flirting. But flirting was all she'd ever do. She scorned human men when it came down to it; "they're all beneath us, Anyanka, darling, but it is fun to lead them on."  
  
It all fell apart when Cordelia's wish went wrong. She lost her family and friends; D'Hoffryn scorned her, Halfrek abandoned her, and she was weak and mortal and alone. So she did what she'd always done, so very long ago when she was human before. She found a man. That it happened to be the same one who was at the root of her newly-returned humanity struck her as a sort of ironic penance.  
  
But that didn't work, either. She fell in love with him, pathetic and human just like her, and she realized, eventually, that - without trying - she'd found friends. His friends had become hers. This hadn't happened before; when she was with Olaf, he'd always kept her apart from his friends, men who mocked her for being strange. Xander's friends accepted her. She didn't know what to make of it, at first or later, and then without knowing she discovered that they were part of a family. It caught her off guard, at first, when Buffy called them a family. They weren't related by blood, or even the ties that had bound her to D'Hoffryn and Halfrek, and she wasn't sure how it worked out. She wasn't even sure if they were all friends, since she was quite positive that few enough of the relationships were based on mutual like.  
  
She had trouble understanding, but they accepted her anyhow. Except they didn't, really, not all of them, and most especially not him, who left her just like she'd known he would, known with a millennia of experience and yet hoped anyhow. Him least of all, who swore his undying love and then hated her for being what she'd been for a thousand years. Him, who she'd been hoping to take and make her husband, and once and for always get over that lingering fear of betrayal that, as it turned out, was right after all.  
  
So she tried to fit back in with D'Hoffryn and Halfrek and the family she'd been with longest. But it didn't work, because she still felt tied, somehow, to those humans who had, however briefly, cared. They understood her, unlike demons. It seemed odd to her, that humans could understand her where her own kind could not. And, more importantly, that demons, demons like her, could destroy, utterly and completely, everything she'd held on to for a thousand years. She knew, had always known, really, that D'Hoffryn was quite capable of a number of things. It was impossible for him not to be, what with his job. But somehow, naively, she hadn't thought that he could act like that against his own family.  
  
So she doesn't understand family and friends. She doesn't know how family can stand to betray each other. She doesn't know how friends become family, or even how they become friends. She doesn't know why she keeps trusting people when they betray her. And she'd like to trust Buffy, but she knows that she can't. She doesn't know when they'll turn against her, but she knows that they will. That's what family's for. 


End file.
